Spiffy:

Iffy:

Will there be any difference between the three versions? Will the controls in the console games need to be tweaked?

When talking about first-person shooters with a focus on multiplayer action, a few prominent names immediately spring to mind. QUAKE. Battlefield 1942. Halo 2. Recently, however, one series has been leaving the bodies of its competition - on both PC and console platforms - strewn all over the battlefield. Epic's Unreal franchise has been around for a number of years, but it was the most recent installment, Unreal Tournament 2004, that really pushed it into the series into the gaming stratosphere. Thanks to the success of Unreal Championship 2, it also has a strong following among console-owning gamers. Now, for the first time, a brand new Unreal title is coming to both PCs and next-gen consoles simultaneously.

We got a chance to check out a brief demo of Unreal Tournament 2007 at last night's Midway event, with members of Epic walking us through some of the game's features. Although the game will also be appearing on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, the game was demoed on a high-end PC. The demo kicked off with Epic Mark Rein telling the audience that what we'd be seeing was still very early, although the first level we saw looked excellent.

Rein mentioned that working primarily in a sci-fi environment was liberating in a number of ways, but it could be alienating for some players. It was for this reason that the team at Epic has always tried to keep their games grounded in reality, even when they are set on a far-off, made-up planet. We then got a tour of a robot factory on Liandri, where a number of conveyor belts and floating platforms actually affect the gameplay on the level. They also showed us the level of detail on the metal walls and floors, which they had "grungified" by adding dirt and scuff marks.

One of the things that the team prides itself on is the ability to create weapons that look like they could plausibly work in the real world. If you watch the guns while they're being fired, you'll notice all sorts of little details that make the proceedings more realistic. When you shoot the rocket launcher, for instance, you'll see new shells popping into the barrel immediately while a small wisp of smoke dissipates into the air. The team revisited many of the franchise's classic weapons, tweaking their primary and alternate fire modes a bit.